is highly ingenious, and the deliverance at last, although a fresh horror in itself, is unexpected cheer. That the accursed bacteria of disease and putrefaction should come to man’s rescue and stay the Martians (who, having no bacteria in their otherwise happy home, have developed no resisting power against them as we have) is an untying worthy of Mr. Wells’s genius. Under his accustomed skill of treatment the whole is entirely convincing, but we acknowledge that we prefer terror in smaller prescriptions. We suspect, however, that Mr. Wells thinks it nothing, as Mr. Thoreau says, to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar, and that he is not likely to be restrained from ever bolder flights of his weird fancy, to ever stranger places, whither perforce his spellbound readers must follow.

—June 9, 1898

JOSEPH CONRAD

I suppose you’ll have the common decency to believe me when I tell you I am always powerfully impressed by your work. Impressed is the word, 0 Realist of the Fantastic! whether you like it or not. And if you want to know what impresses me it is to see how you contrive to give over humanity into the clutches of the Impossible and yet manage to keep it down (or up) to its humanity, its flesh, blood, sorrow, folly. That is the achievement!

—from a letter to Wells (December 4, 1898)

WILLIAM L. ALDEN

We owe Mr. Wells a debt of gratitude for having blocked the path of the dozens of men who would certainly have written stories of the general character of the “War of the Worlds” if he had not forestalled them and made imitation preposterous.

—from the New York Times (March 25, 1899)

H. G. WELLS

I had rather be called a journalist than an artist.

—from a letter to Henry James (July 8, 1915)

WILLIAM ARCHER

Is not Mr. Wells the great Adventurer of latter-day literature? No quest is too perilous for him, no forlorn-hope too daring. He led the first explorers to the moon. He it was who lured the Martians to earth and exterminated them with microbes. He has ensnared an angel from the skies and expiscated a mermaid from the deep. He has mounted a Time Machine (of his own invention) and gone careening down the vistas of the Future.

—from God and Mr. Wells ( 1917)

CONRAD AIKEN

The critics have been right. For as one looks back over Mr. Wells’s long and honourable record as a novelist one fails to recall a single vivid or credible character. They are all alike—and all alike in being rather colourless automata, mere puppets by which their manipulator has sought to demonstrate his successive attitudes toward a changing world.

—from the Atlantic Monthly (November 1926)

E. M. FORSTER

All Wells’s characters are as flat as a photograph. But the photographs are agitated with such vigour that we forget their complexities lie on the surface and would disappear if it was scratched or curled up.

—from Aspects of the Novel (1927)

Questions

1. According to Alfred Mac Adam, “Within Wells’s personal interpretation of evolution, the Martians are what humans will be thousands of centuries into the future.” If that is so, the novel depicts humanity’s future destroying its present. Was Wells right about what was happening in his own time? Is it true now that what we are becoming is destroying what we are? Is the process one to lament or cheer on?

2. Would modern Americans act like Wells’s English people in the face of such an attack, or would they react differently?

3. What objections would you make to the Artilleryman’s speech beginning “Life is real again...” (see p. 177).

4. Consider countries you know of that have recently been devastated by an external enemy. Have they become better, more unified, less decadent, more progressive? Compare your observations with Wells’s remarks in his Epilogue (p. 199).

For Further Reading

Other Works by H. G. Wells

The Time Machine (1895)

The Wonderful Visit (1895)

The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896)

The Invisible Man (1897)

Tales of Space and Time (1899)

When the Sleeper Wakes (1899)

Love and Mr. Lewisham (1900)

The First Men in the Moon (1901)

Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (1902)

The Food of the Gods (1904)

Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul (1905)

A Modern Utopia (1905)

New Worlds for Old (1908)

The War in the Air (1908)

Ann Veronica (1909)

Tono-Bungay (1909)

The History of Mr. Polly (1910)

The New Machiavelli (1911)

Marriage (1912)

Mr. Britling Sees It Through (1916)

The Outline of History (1920, with several subsequent revised editions)

Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island (1928)

The Science of Life (1929—1930)

The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (1931)

The Bulpington of